“I’ve been on a mission in recent months to establish just how common and mundane GPL violations are. Since 21 August 2009, I’ve been finding one new GPL violating company per day (on average) and I am still on target to find one per day for 365 days straight. When I tell this to people who are new to GPL enforcement, they are surprised and impressed. However, when I tell people who have done GPL enforcement themselves, they usually say some version of: Am I supposed to be impressed by that? Couldn’t a monkey do that? Fact is, the latter are a little bit right: there are so many GPL violations that I might easily be able to go on finding one per day for two years straight.”
Thom, you may wish to edit the OSNews article to indicate who wrote the article. It reads as if you are the one hunting down GPL violations, rather than Bradley M. Kuhn.
Regarding the article itself, it’s a sad state of affairs. But back in my corporate days, I remember lots of dubious behavior in using (L)GPL in software without batting an eye going on. I’m sad to know that’s more the default than I suspected.
Firstly is says “Linked by: Thom…” and secondly the entire text is encapsulated by quotes. Thirdly, if it where written by thom it would be on the front page.
I think that is enough for most people to figure out it was not written by Thom.
It states “posted by” in the main page of the story. Only here in comments section it claims “linked by” but there is no proper link anywhere, still. Hiding it in the context isn’t proper way to do the linking.
Edited 2009-11-11 10:27 UTC
When will people learn to read licenses?
I’d like to know the all the kind of GPL violations found, from the one that forgot a simple comma to the one is not distributiong the source code.
In theory it sounds simple. Developer X releases the product under GPL. Company Y wishes to include the software in their product. Company Y contacts developer X and they settle the matter, company pays some compensation and that’s it.
The real problem is when there is a number of contributors, not just one developer X. Company needs to negotiate with a number of parties, and some of them might not be easy to get in contact with.
GPL needs to address that kind of problem, perhaps there should be a variant of GPL. Dual licensing may be ok when there is a single developer, or a developer with special rights (like MySQL).